“We are happy to offer you $100 donations to each of the 200 families you were planning to support this holiday season. I hope this helps to ease the stress and inconvenience our error has caused. I want you to know that we’re all sincerely sorry for this mistake.”

“We are happy to offer you $100 donations to each of the 200 families you were planning to support this holiday season. I hope this helps to ease the stress and inconvenience our error has caused. I want you to know that we’re all sincerely sorry for this mistake.”

- Paypal

Yay!

Did I read that right? Paypal donated $20,000!?

I would not be surprised to learn they had - this blew up fast, and caught a lot of popular social media attention. $20,000 to make a stab at wooing back dozens/hundreds/thousands of angry customers, who generate how much revenue? I would love to know what the actual closed account impact was.

I've generally been reasonably happy with PayPal - when my iTunes account was hacked, both PayPal and iTunes worked quickly to correct and reverse charges, and to let me know they had done so. But a black eye like this can linger - in 6 months, how many people will be saying, "oh, yeah; I heard about what they did to regretsy, and haven't used it since"? They're hoping to keep that number to a minimum, with limited success. Until I spotted this, I didn't know they had managed an *effective* resolution, and technically, I still don't. I don't follow regretsy, so saw only the lame-donkey attempt they made at first.

Anger has a lot of staying power, especially in an information vacuum. (Nor do I think anybody has a responsibility to broadcast PayPal's token offering (which is really all $20,000 is to Paypal. PayPal brought disdain upon itself; it will have to do the bell-ringing to say it tried to fix its colossal public relations foul-up.)

Logged

• Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe.

From what i can tell, April is the one who set it up wrong in the first place, and now everyone is blaming PayPal for her mistake. If you go to your bank and fill in the wrong paperwork they aren't gong to magically intuit what you really meant; they're going to assume -- as well they should -- that you filed things correctly. Everyone is bashing PayPal and saying oh, poor poor April and those poor poor families; but it all could have been avoided if she had a clue what she was doing in the first place. It isn't PayPal's fault. If it was a misuse of funds, which it easily could have been, everyone would still be bashing PayPal for being careless. No matter what, they couldn't win here, even for donig the right thing. Meanwhile, Regretsy is posting things like F*** You, PayPal! but i guess her foul mouth gets a pass on top of her making a mistake and then blaming someone else for it. No rudeness there, no sirree, she's just fine and dandy.

I've never had a problem with PayPal, in fact they have come through for me when i had issues on eBay; Regretsy, on the other hand, i don't trust worth a darm someone who doesn't even know how to direct funds and then curses at the entity who only does as she asked.

Logged

It's alright, man. I'm only bleeding, man. Stay hungry, stay free, and do the best you can. ~Gaslight Anthem

From what i can tell, April is the one who set it up wrong in the first place, and now everyone is blaming PayPal for her mistake.

Not exactly. PayPal doesn't have clear rules on their Web site for how to use the "donate" button. In fact, the "rules" that they told April about appear NO WHERE on the PayPal site. When they told April of their policy (which is not their actual policy), she followed the course of action they recommended. They then told her that was wrong, too. Add to that the ridiculous nonsense that came from PayPal reps (helping the poor isn't a worthy cause, you can use the donate button to help your sick cat but not poor kids, etc), and I'd say PayPal is fully in the wrong. In addition, PayPal froze both the Regretsy account AND April's personal account. The process for account review is a whole other clustermess; it's based solely on gut feelings. There is no rhyme or reason. Finally, they made her refund all the money but kept $2 from each transaction for doing absolutely nothing.

Oh, and let's not forget that PayPal told the media they'd talked to April and offered to make a donation before they actually did.

Honestly, PayPal's policy on the donate button is a hot mess and makes no sense. It certainly doesn't help that the policy that they enforce doesn't actually appear anywhere on their site.

If you go to your bank and fill in the wrong paperwork they aren't gong to magically intuit what you really meant; they're going to assume -- as well they should -- that you filed things correctly.

And yet you think April should have been able to intuit that PayPal had policies that do not appear on their site. How was she supposed to know (again, given that it is not written anywhere on their site) that people using personal accounts can take donations using the donate button but people using corporate accounts can't? Heck, the people working at PayPal don't even seem to know the rules!

From Regretsy:

Quote

I was initially told that all of this was triggered by my incorrect use of the Paypal donation button. “Only a registered nonprofit can use the donation button,” they told me, and that’s what I told you.

Except that turns out to be false.

Anyone can use a donation button. For anything. That’s why you see them on blogs, raising money for bandwidth or medical bills, or even beer money.

According to the Paypal executive who called me today, “The information you were given about using the donation button was definitely incorrect, and at the end of the day, it was an error in judgment on the agent’s part.” ... Except he’s not the only one I heard it from. I also got that information in two separate emails from Paypal. And that means that Paypal’s donation policies are so poorly worded and vague that even the people who work there don’t understand them.

I recommend this article, which lays out how PayPal was not following their actual policy.